Friday’s hack-a-thon was one of several such events that have taken place across the country in the last few months as public interest in protecting scientific data increases along with the risks posed by the President Donald Trump anti-science rhetoric. Since Trump took office, government agency websites have removed references to climate change, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees have been forbidden from talking to the press or publishing new research, and harsh budget cuts have been proposed for the EPA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

To counter the fear and despair many are feeling at the idea of the government sabotaging its own scientific data, a community dedicated to data rescue has risen up in resistance.

“For participants, it is something really concrete that you can do that is not just feeling that you’re unsettled by the way this administration approaches science,” said Sarah Wylie, assistant professor of sociology and health science at Northeastern and one of the organizers of the event. “It is a really good tangible activity for people to become a part of where they meet people of like minds. That is a really important outcome, the community building part of it.”

Hack-a-ton attendees split into three groups: harvesters, seeders and storytellers.

The harvesters wrote code in three different languages to scrape data on topics ranging from water quality and snow cover to crime and grain phenotype and genotype. The seeders collected 1,100 URLs from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service pages and nominated them to Internet Archive – a non-profit digital library that has archived more than 286 billion web pages. The storytellers created signs for the March For Science that took place on April 22, made a visualization of #MyEPA tweets over times and worked on redesigning the EDGI website.

The event was primarily the work of EDGI, which formed in December with the goal of demonstrating that there is a public interest in the existence and the preservation of federal data. In addition to putting on data rescue events, EDGI is monitoring 25,000 federal websites for any change to data and conducting interviews with people leaving federal agencies to record the human experience of this historical transition.

“The term data rescue has been uniquely picked up for this moment, but the concept of preserving data is certainly not new,” said Wylie, who is also a founding member of EDGI.

There has always been some concern about preserving data when the White House transitions from one president to another. In 2008, the End of Term Harvest Project was formed to harvest federal government domains in order to create a portrait of the George W. Bush administration and track changes Barack Obama took the White House. But their goal was to protect against more benign threats that those federal agencies are currently facing.

“We’re used to hearing the occasional story of lost research data, but those are generally situations that happen either accidentally or through benign neglect, when data hardware or formats become obsolete and can no longer be accessed,”Jen Ferguson, the research data management librarian at Northeastern and organizer of the event, said. She cited the famous incident where NASA accidentally taped over footage of the moon landing.

“But this is on a much larger scale, the idea that data could be disappeared en masse to serve a point of view – in other words, to remove or obscure evidence of climate change,” said Ferguson.

According to Ferguson, this is the first time in American history that federal data and the scientific research it supports have been so at risk from the government itself. However, one only has to look as far as Canada to see historical similarities.

In 2006 Stephen Harper became the Prime Minister of Canada and implemented a broad policy forbidding scientists from speaking to the press about their work and cutting government funding for scientific research, and slashing the size of agencies. With Prime Minister Harper – as with President Trump – anti-intellectual sentiment was used to discredit the research that scientists were doing for government agencies.

“There was a feeling that the government was not interested in expert opinion, and I think it’s the same kind of thing that you are probably going to see with the new [Trump] administration” David Tarasick, a senior research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada (the equivalent of the U.S. EPA), told Scientific American in December.

The parallels between what is happening now and what happened under the Harper administration is one of the reasons that the data rescue movement caught on so quickly in America, according to Ferguson. And because they have experienced it before, Canadian scientists have been quick to join the data rescue effort.

It is illegal to destroy government data, but access can always be denied in other ways.

“Because the data that we’re talking about is accessible over the internet, no-one would even necessarily have to destroy the data. Just breaking links to it would serve the same purpose,” said Ferguson. “And while other copies of a given data set no doubt exist in the world – it’s been backed up and downloaded by people – in today’s political climate, can you imagine the argument that would ensue over the legitimacy of a data set that was in the hands of a scientist studying climate change?”

Lost scientific data has the potential to set scientific research back very far, very quickly – and in some cases permanently. It would also change the lives of the millions of Americans who work with and rely on data.

“All of science depends on data if you think about it,” said Wylie. “Climate science, completely depends on our knowledge of past records of temperature or past records of water depth. There is harm to any kind of scientific enterprise if there is a loss of a data set that is key to being able to follow patterns in the world.”

Ultimately, the data rescue movement it not about fear, but about civic engagement with public data (data funded by tax dollars) and building a community that will last well beyond the current threats to science.

“[Data rescue] is certainly something that was started because of the election, but I think the ideas of it are hopefully must longer lasting than just a few years,” said EDGI member and Harvard doctoral candidate Maya Anjur-Dietrich. “There is also the question of federal data being something that people are aware of and interested in and taking ownership of because this your data, this is public data.”

“And so while this idea that a Trump presidency and an anti-science perspectives has scared people, I think this kind of thing should be happening all the time because I think having civic engagement with public knowledge is something that ideally we would have all the time.”

Event organizer Sara Wylie, who is also an Assistant professor of sociology and heath science at Northeastern University, speaks about the important of public data.

“I am the research data management librarian here, so the question of potentially disappearing data is near and dear to my heart,” said event organizer Jen Furgeson. “Students and faculty use these data sets a lot. They ask for help with them, access to them all the time. And concerned citizens use them all the time for various reasons.”

“If you have an event you build up a local community and then you can have that community persist,” said Environmental Data & Governance Initiative volunteer Maya Anjur-Dietrich.

The seeders collected 1,100 URLs from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service pages and nominated them to Internet Archive – a non-profit digital library that has archived more than 286 billion web pages.

“Environment, climate and energy: these things are very important, but we are just fighting one of the battles,” said Andrew Bergman who works for EDGI and attended Northeastern’s data rescue hackaton. “Some things are even more pressing – civil rights, police shootings, immigration data – that data is very much at risk as well. But EDGI is focusing on environment and climate data.”

“This hackathon was a bit of a challenge compared to others, because we had a lot less time to work with,” said Ferguson. “It took the organizers a while to come up with tracks and tasks that would work in our short time frame.”

Northeastern University Libraries and the Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI) hosted a data rescue event on Friday March 24 that brought students, data scientists, researchers, journalists, and concerned citizens from the Greater Boston Area together to ensure that public data is protected for generations to come.